Nope, if I'm absolutely honest, it hasn't matched my expectations. It has blown them out of the water and made what I thought would just maybe be possible, look like a complete underestimation of the capabilities.
I was genuinely expecting to be a bit disappointed with certain things, as you mention yourself, I'm the sort of nutter who researches everything to death before making a decision - just so I know what will suit me, and what will disappoint the least - because no matter what you read, or see online, it's never the same as putting it through its paces by yourself.
My iMac is a Late 2015 27" i5 Retina 5K, 1TB SSD, 32GB RAM, can't remember what graphics card I got in it, its already been thrown to the scrap heap

So I was expecting a decent jump in performance with the M1 considering the age of the iMac, but not what I actually got.
I decided on my quest of what to try next, to do what I thought should bring the M1 to its knees and show me its limitations, after all, this made my iMac crumble like badly made shortbread.
Fusion 360. I have some models in that which made my iMac completely unusable - to the point that even if I just wanted to change a position, I would enter new coordinates, then bugger off for 15 minutes or so while it did it. Even on friends newer iMacs, which are considerably more powerful than mine, one model in particular can turn them into beach balling slideshows.
So, I opened that up on the MBA M1 and, well, nothing, no disaster, no slowdown, I can throw the model around the screen and it all happens in real-time. I've literally never seen that before.
After picking myself up off the floor. I opened up another project, then another, then another. With four projects open, I clearly wasn't pushing it enough. So, I duplicated the most complex model, and again, and again, and again, and again, and then I gave up.
I cannot believe, well I can, I've just seen it - though I don't know how it's doing it - how powerful this tiny, fan-less, ARM, 8GB....
8GB I haven't had an 8GB machine in god knows how many years, I've certainly never had one that can perform these kinds of miracles.
It didn't even get warm, at all, its utter insanity. Even the battery only dropped by 2% during that workout, or, what I thought would be a workout. My wife's 2020 MBA (Intel) blows through it's battery if you ask it to do anything remotely demanding.
There is of course, a lot of testing still to be done, I'm not about to render final judgement from basically 2 main tests. But if this wee bugger can cope with video/photo/vector editing anything like it has Xcode and Fusion 360, I am going to be one happy chappie. That's the bulk of my workload, other than writing, and that I can do on a BBC Micro, so I'm not overly concerned about the MBA managing it 🤣
Oh, and I forgot to mention, that Fusion is running under Rosetta.